Happy End of the World
by Kikkoman-Writes
Summary: After defeating Sephiroth at the Northern Crater, Avalanche finds themselves stuck in a world of the past, but without them. The choices are obvious to some, but not so for others. Time Travel.
1. Chapter 1

Summary: After defeating Sephiroth at the Northern Crater, Avalanche finds themselves stuck in a world of the past, but without them. The choices are obvious to some, but not so for others. Time Travel.

Chapter 1 - _The Earth Goes Around_

The green light flooded their surroundings as they watched the world irreversibly change before their eyes. They had won the war against Shinra, against Sephiroth, against the destruction of the planet. The piercing glow of the Lifestream did not scorch their eyes. It was like the woman who summoned it.

It washed away the world for each warrior on that cliff. It was quiet. The blowing wind and crumbling rocks were silenced as a peaceful lull cleansed their surroundings. It was not hauntingly eerie to them. They smiled or laughed or stared at the green with a proud glimmer in their eyes.

The world was safe.

As the world grew darker once again, they could see each others, but they saw her. Their friend, their confidant, their sister, their friend was luminescent in the greying surroundings. She met their eyes, filled with emotions, and began to smile.

The world froze. They stared at the woman who was paused in her familiar brave air and tried to reach her.

 _No no no..._

A sound of broken glass pierced the desolate atmosphere.

 _Aeris!_

* * *

Tifa woke with a start in the Nibelheim cemetery. Although the town burned to a crisp that fateful day, the distant graveyard escaped from Sephiroth's rampage, but not Shinra's interference. She absently noted the lack of cameras and the smell of autumn leaves in the air. It was late summer, but Nibelheim wore the seasons early sometimes.

She made a mental note to ask Aeris, _a cemetery, really, girl?_ , sometime in the future, but it was time to find her friends.

She looked around the cemetery from her position in the Lockhart section, which she only noticed after nearly tripping over granduncle Albertus' priggish gravestone. She swept her gaze until her eyes reached a blond nest of hair in the smallest, shadowy corner.

He was standing with his head bent down staring at a gravestone.

 _Cloud... I won't let you suffer alone._

She would promise at least that to herself.

As she approached, he looked up to meet her eyes. His eyes were not filled with a familiar grief, but a stunned confusion.

"Tifa, look at my gravestone."

 _His?_ She looked and immediately understood why he looked as he did. That day of death... this wasn't right at all.

 _ **Cloud Strife**_

 _ **XXXX 1986 - XXXX 1995**_

"What?" If Cloud was supposedly dead in this world, then...

She turned quickly and rushed to the Lockhart's area. She dimly knew that Cloud was following her. In less than a minute, the two found the gravestone. It grimly met their expectations.

* * *

 _Garbage._

Red XIII immediately leaped off the dumpster he found himself on and swore to himself to get a bath. But, first of all, business.

Business like Midgar. Why was Midgar whole? He saw no signs of torn metal structures or shredded concrete.

A depressing thought crept up his spinal cord and he began to dig through a relatively clean pile with bits of paper. Newspapers, forms, and other magazines all bearing the same range of dates. It was 1997. The Wutai War raged at its fiercest. Shinra was rapidly augmenting its military and economic strength. He was in a dumpster.

If this really was the past, he needed to...

* * *

If Aeris really wanted to send them back home, she could have said something or not done that weird video game glitch. She'll say her greetings to Dad and his stuffy advisors and then run off again to find the others.

Just to check on them really!

She didn't really get why Aeris left her at Mom's incense-smelly death shrine, but even superpowered flower girls had accuracy issues with sending people at home. It wasn't really that big of a thing anyways. She needed to say her greetings anyways.

 _Mom... I've had a lot of adventures lately... I'll tell you all about them right now! You'll get to hear them before Dad does, heh!_

She spun around and plopped down. "So I met this blond-" This wasn't right. She was right here in the living breathing flesh - Yuffie Kisaragi - the best ninja ever! Jeez, Dad probably worried his mustache off about the last battle and set up a whole funeral already. It was just weird that he would toss away Mom's stuff though.

She heard footsteps outside the shadowy room. They were... heading towards the entrance. She could make out a woman's dress through the door and leapt up quickly on the rafter as the door slid open. A servant? No, the shrine was cleaned already. It was a woman she only saw in pictures.

 _Mom?_

The woman collapsed onto the floor in front of the shrine. She was not weeping, but from the tone of her sweet voice, she harbored a deep grief.

"Yuffie, I'm sorry your father wasn't able to join us today. He promised to you that after what Shinra did to you, he would protect Wutai, you know? I'm sorry about this whole chaos, but when the war ends, we can bring your memory to a peaceful rest. He'll be fine. You've never seen him fight, but your father is very strong and he loves you and Wutai very much. Sorry for bringing up these old worries, but... trust in us."

 _The Wutai War is still going on? What happened to everyone then? If Mom survived that Shinra assassin, then... then... I didn't? Shinra... I can't forgive them then._

She waited for her Mom to leave the room. It was a painful time filled with apologies. It was Shinra's fault for her Mom's grief, her country's ruin, her death. She defeated monsters, angels, demons, and even gods. She would lay to rest her parents' mourning and protect Wutai as a vengeful ghost.

 _Mom... please don't apologize. I'll make things fine._

* * *

He never believed in gods or religion or spirits, but if this was karma for a mission burying a Shinra rival alive back in his Turk days, he probably deserved that. That Aeris woman probably teleported him here or not, but the important part was that he had to unbury himself. He had his material still equipped to his bracer and picked through the options in his minds.

Fire, no. Ice, maybe. Thunder, no. Quake, maybe. Goblin Punch from the Monster Skill materia seemed to work the best. It was cramped, but he'd been through worse. He never met her, the flower girl, but she didn't seemed to be the type to purposely drop him off in a coffin around two feet below the ground. It's probably hard teleporting everyone to safety while saving the world.

He punched upwards against the floor's bottom. It blew away the layers around his torso and he quickly cursed himself for his luck. The ground below was weaker than he believed. Of course the Shinra mansion didn't follow basic standards of construction. He sighed and decided to summon a _friend_ when two familiar people lifted him up and away.

He raised an eyebrow at them. Both looked mildly stunned at his situation for a moment before settling their faces into the "We're horrified, but we have bad news too" faces.

* * *

The townspeople, the nosy useless gossips they were, hovered around him in a crowd. Yes, he found himself lying on the ground a few minutes ago back in Rocket Town, but did they have to herd like stupid lumbering cows? He just saved the damn world and this is what he gets - stunned looks, weird glances, and 'Didn't he die?'

He was breathing fine! You leave for a bit to help out a bunch of loonies and then everyone is one. Where was Shera when he needed her and a stiff drink?

Ah, there she was. She looked stunned, sniffly, and a hell of a lot younger. She opened her mouth and said stiffly "Cid? How are you- I saw you die yesterday! The rocket exploded and I couldn't- couldn't."

She burst into tears, while Cid couldn't burst into curses or say anything, he didn't know what the fucking hell he got himself into either?

* * *

 _Time to clean out the trash then._

Reeve sighed to himself as he separated the trash can to gather the edges of the plastic bag. He just threw away a ton of wasted blueprints from half of the executive board and his latest prototype of Cait Sith, which spontaneously exploded for some weird engineering issues.

"Howdy!" The fully functional grinning cat popped out from the pit of papers, coffee cups, and broken gears - scaring a year or two from his life span. _Cait Sith is functional?_ It jumped out and a gray blob followed it. _That's functional too?_

As Reeve took in some much-needed oxygen, he watched the functioning robots find a newspaper and scanned its detail. "Ah, that makes sense! Let's talk."

 _What does? I'm pretty sure nothing does_.

* * *

"We don't want you here."

"Alright, alright, you indecisive lunatics. I'm leaving!"

You would think after saving the tent city from a bunch of Shinra goons, stopping a world destroying meteor, and punching some executives in the face, people would show some forgiveness.

Nope! Just two weeks after grabbing the Huge Materia here, everyone changed their tunes to "Never come back here again, Barrett" from "Let's work together to rebuild our home." The life.

He needed to get back to Marlene, to his friends, to home.

But, first of all, he might as well help the world out by cleaning up some things here. He would have thought that after all that weird Lifestream business, the reactors would have shut down, but Aeris seemed pretty busy already, so he couldn't fault her forgetting or leaving him at that desert cliff, where so many hopes and dreams went wrong.

* * *

 _Author's Note:_

 _Some inspirations for this story -_

 _1\. Sinnatious' "The Fifth Act"_

 _2\. Youtube - Sephiroth vs. Yuffie / Tifa / Cid / Vincent / etc. (Solo). Hey, if you can kill Sephiroth's God form with anyone not Cloud, everyone can beat him up in 1997 (two years before Wutai War ended). If they choose to beat him up is 1 question, but there's no power differences between any of the cast. There might be some winners and losers based on strategy and experiences, but they're all Level 99, super buff, stacked with Hero Drinks and mastered material_

 _3\. No Angst! Cloud_


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - _They All Laughed_

Vincent and Tifa, as the most subtle figures (a.k.a. without glowing mako eyes), were dispatched to destroy the Nibelheim reactor and hopefully Jenova at the same time. Cloud, in the meantime, would find Cid and Yuffie.

 _SHINRA's Space Program Ends with a Boom!_

A recent newspaper, around two or three days old, proclaimed the end of the space shuttle program and this world's Cid Highwind with the usual ugly optimism of propaganda. The three guessed that Cid might be found around Rocket Town - in a graveyard or the town center. Vincent, under heavy disguise (sunglasses. extreme contouring, and an reappropriated labcoat), weaseled a phone from a store and disappeared from the town folk's imagination for the time being.

The disguised man's ugly figure would be brought back in an explosion-originated nightmare for Nibelheim and Shinra. It was a weak way to pin blame, but the three were shooting cannonballs somewhat erratically in foggy, stormy, and absolutely unknown territory. Cloud did mention that Hojo ranted about explosions sometimes.

Vincent and Tifa began to systematically remove the experiments from the mako chambers and send them to rest. AVALANCHE was possibly brought back to the past for something, but they had so much to fix, so much to destroy, so much to kill.

Vincent sighed and looked at Tifa. She looked grim, but her eyebrows furrowed in concentration and her mouth flattened to a determined line. The woman insisted that Cloud find Cid instead and although the resulting argument was fierce, Vincent understood why she did not want Cloud to deal with this dirty work. A strong heart with a Turk-like sense of doing business - Tifa was a protector.

After an eternity, they were done. They could see some of the corpses slowly disappearing into the Lifestream and nodded to each other. Vincent stepped back to prepare his long-range rifle and Tifa cast haste and regen on herself. Vincent copied her and threw a ether on the woman.

They were ready.

Vincent watched carefully as Tifa literally tore apart the locked metal door with her fists. As they suspected, Jenova was waiting. The two weren't the best team to face the alien in this setting, but once Jenova's combat form was triggered, the battle was all but won. Even as they stood almost thirty feet away from the alien on a sturdy metal platform, the two could utterly destroy Jenova and the reactor.

Vincent began immediately. He fired explosive shots at the alien's tank, tearing it apart. Tifa began to cast buffs and debuffs until the metal casing fell apart.

He aimed at the head. It wouldn't kill the alien, but hopefully it would trigger it to transform into its final form. He was right, as usual, but the alien began to screech for a long time and Tifa shot him an annoyed look before casting a petty Silence on the monster.

He also shot it in the mouth as an apology, but by then, Jenova had transformed into its orb like form and grew another mouth. Tifa had already inflicted all possible status effects on the weakened form, which thankfully carried over. Although the martial artist was primarily a short-range combatant, she was no slouch with materia at all possible distances unlike Barrett. The silence wore off before it died unfortunately. It took ten minutes of casting spells and shooting, but Jenova had its last revenge by screeching one last screech.

It took longer, Vincent noted, to actually to erase traces of its cells. Flames of a Fire 3 scoured the platform and the tank until the metal walkway and platform fell off.

They walked out of the reactor, a calm strut. The cameras had all been disabled by Vincent's careful sniping and Cloud, on the way to Rocket Town, would disable the signal tower. They had no Jessie or Cid or Barrett to provide explosives. Summons would work though.

And so, while Tifa swigged an elixir, Vincent sighed and summoned Odin. The clear sky grew stormy and ozone filled the air.

The two walked away, ready to head to Gongaga.

* * *

Cloud saw a somewhat thick trail of smoke rise above the horizon towards the direction of the Shinra mansion. They only wanted to burn down the dangerous papers and the lab equipment and the framed portrait of President Shinra because two things burning completely down was a bit too suspicious, but the three didn't care and felt that they should be entitled to some laziness.

Vincent had voiced his disagreement, but in the end, they decided to let the sprinklers, rusted and unmaintained, decide.

He thought to himself _Welcome noble sprinklers to AVALANCHE_ and waved off the thought quickly. Were the two done? It shouldn't take them this long. He knew that Jenova's presence slowly muted and then vanished recently, but- he saw the storm clouds gather, lightning shake the size, and a metallic spear blink across the sky and heard a boom.

From his position in the wrecked communications tower, Cloud saw the explosion's clouds of smoke and watched as they settled.

It was time to go then. At least, Cid would be in the same area. Yuffie could be in outer space or Modeoheim for all he knew. It would be worse as it took three days to reach Wutai undercover, while avoiding the barricade of Shinra ships. The three hadn't decided on Wutai. They were unwilling to bring themselves into a mess of death and bloodshed, but they knew that Yuffie and her country had suffered under Shinra for more than a decade, even before the war.

Cloud would talk to Yuffie and they would decide whether to bring the present AVALANCHE members into the conflict or not.

In the meantime, he hoped the situation wouldn't escalate and Yuffie didn't gut some Shinra bigwig and rob them over these three days. When it came to Cloud hoping things and Yuffie, however, Yuffie would do the opposite.

Cloud, however, as a man of the present, whistled happily away into the forest and cut down dragons and wolves as he headed to Rocket Town.

* * *

Cid was miserable. He liked Aeris and all, but did she have to dump him more than a decade into the past? Shera and the townsfolk accepted that he was alive, a bit more grizzled, and ten years and three months older than before his death.

Yes, his figure did stay pretty much the same, but how do you leap an impossible gap? He had lost his anger towards Shera after discovering the flaws in the oxygen tanks, but she held a different guilt now - forgetting the flaw and then losing him.

He had ten years of living with her, berating her, loving her that she would never have. Those years were lost now in an ambiguous, possibly nonexistent time. He, a rocket engineer, obviously read books about time travel and parallel worlds and quantum physics. There were two possibilities - his world was lost now, reset to a never-gonna-happen possibility or it only took a leap to an infinite number of worlds and Cids to find home.

The odds were grim. He wondered if Barrett or Cloud or the brat ended up in the same hell. It was only the journey of an year, but those folks were the tightest friends he ever had. Even if only Yuffie was there with her dumb hijinks, he would win the Wutai War for her. At least, she would understand the gulf of a time lost. Any of them would.

Someone knocked on the door. Before, he would have made Shera get it, but guilt and tiredness ate at him as he rose to open the door.

What he found wasn't Yuffie, but it was Cloud, who was quiet and weird as fuck sometimes, but generally alright and occasionally funny.

"Are the others here?" The question burst out, almost in an embarrassing way. He would have been flustered if it was any of the team but Cloud, who was socially out-of-it to not notice things.

"Tifa and Vincent were with me, but I sent them somewhere else. I was going to get Yuffie afterwards." And Cloud, true to form, did not notice at all Cid's eagerness. He motioned to talk somewhere private.

"The backyard has nobody worth worrying about. Shera, I'm heading out with a friend!" Her faint reply was obscured by the wooden walls.

Rocket Town, being a somewhat small town, gave gigantic backyards to folks who ended up settling here. The two men walked over to the outskirts, where no one was, to talk.

"Ah, I didn't want to intrude. You've already settled back home and we still have a pile to fix. It's fine if you-" Cloud sounded somewhat embarrassed. The guy was probably thinking that Cid was all happy to be at a home or something.

"It's no big deal. Like I said, the planet is like a small baby or something and we need to help out. I don't mind finishing up some work before running to Costa del Sol and sleeping and drinking." Cid interrupted Cloud quickly.

Some terrorism and running around would help clear up some thoughts and feelings about this new world.

Cloud handed him some numbers, two phone numbers, and a phone. It ironically was the newest model by a decade. "The phone's mine, but I picked up another from Rocket Town, a pre-paid one, since I don't think Shinra network ones work in Wutai at the time. Read a documentary or it was something from Zack."

"And?" Cloud was a great leader and fighter, but he tended to meander and wander to Junon and suddenly show up in Gongaga with his thoughts and words.

"Ah, anyways - contact me or Tifa and Vincent when you need to." (a.k.a. don't be too suspicious with the phone network) "I would like you to meet up with Tifa and Vincent, but I want to check if Barrett is on the West Continent. Tifa thinks he could be in North Corel area or Midgar, but we'll probably hear about him to find out."

"So, find Barrett if possible and join up with the other two if possible. What next?" Cid felt a little better about things, but still had some conflicts over Cloud's apparent acceptance of things.

"I guess Yuffie and I will try to figure out what to do about Wutai and us six will meet up when things are done?" Cloud seemed a little unsure, but Cid felt that made sense.

"That seems good. Are we ever going to try to get back?" Cloud looked vaguely surprised, but his face soon shifted to an understanding.

"I don't know. I'm not sure if it's really possible and I'm alright with both futures, you know, of our world and this world, but we can change this one and make a home here." Cid felt a strange sort of pity for him and probably Tifa and Vincent and the rest of the group - no home, no one truly close except the folks stuck here - they had basically everything here as long as they had each other and they did.

"It's alright. Don't worry about it." Cid laughed and the two began to head back to Shera's place, not to return, but to leave.

* * *

 _Author's Notes_

 _1\. Each chapter will focus on a group of characters sorted by who fought which side of bizarro sephiroth in a youtube video I watched. Obviously, some folks will be together during their different breaks, but it's still third person limited. You can guess somewhat by some foreshadowing or obvious statements of plans what some characters will end up doing, but things will eventually start... coming to a head once newspapers are published, things are said, consequences happen._

 _Groups:_ _cloud:cid:vincent - barret:tifa:yuffie - reeve:red xiii_

 _2\. Cloud is still weird and kinda weirdly Zack-happy, but although I promised no angst!Cloud, everyone's going to get hit with something and it'll be tough for everyone. I just don't like the angst!Cloud where he starts jacking off about Zack and Sephiroth all the time, any other kind of angst!Cloud works._

 _3\. I read too many Michio Kaku books + does anyone ever feel weird about time travel fics where angsty old folks come back to their kid bodies and start romancing folks? or just slide back firmly into place - ready to plan and things? I still read them though._

Thanks


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